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Les Blank, American Hero

When I heard that Les Blank had died, I went over to Lincoln Center, to the film library, to watch the two Les Blank films I think of most often, “Gap-Toothed Women” and “In Heaven There Is No Beer?” Les Blank is probably best known for the 1982 documentary “Burden of Dreams,” a film about the arduous making of “Fitzcarraldo,” the Werner Herzog film set in the jungles of South America, and it is often said that “Burden of Dreams” is a better film than the one it was documenting. But the two filmmakers were after different goals, Herzog’s planned, and Blank’s less planned, if planned at all. “I just started shooting” is a phrase that shows up a lot in Les Blank interviews.

Blank, who will be honored at an upcoming festival in Toronto, was known to take forever to edit a film, and nearly all three dozen of them are like collages, or quilts, with patiently gathered scenes that are stitched together with humor that ultimately has quite serious ends—stitched together by someone who was maybe never satisfied and a little cranky (good things for us). When an interviewer asked Blank if he was happy not too long ago, he demurred. “I wouldn’t define myself as that,” he said. “I’m happier than I would be if I’d done many other things that were offered to me to do.”

What Les Blank film you know and like best might depend on where your interests lie. Traditional musicians are obviously drawn to “Sprout Wings and Fly,” a portrait of the Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell. Aficionados of food—the term “foodies” seems a little too trendy for the likes of Blank—might choose “Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers.” And cinéastes, in addition to “Burden of Dreams,” might have a soft spot for the short film that Blank made about Werner Herzog, entitled “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.” It is based on a boast by Herzog, in which he declared that he would eat his shoe if Errol Morris finished his film “Gates of Heaven,” and it patiently follows Herzog from home to San Francisco, where the shoe is prepared by Alice Waters and her staff at Chez Panisse, boiled in stock for many hours, along the lines of pigs’ feet.

On stage at the première of “Gates of Heaven,” Herzog confesses that he intended to eat the shoe in private, but offers the public meal to young filmmakers. “It should be an encouragement for all of you who want to make films and who are just scared to start, and haven’t got the guts,” Herzog says, about to chew (and chew). But of course, the film reads like a little Chaucerian fable, marked with moral moments about creativity in the devastating crush of television and now the ever-streaming Web. “If you switch on television, it’s just ridiculous and destructive, it kills us, and talk shows when they kill us, they kill our language,” Herzog says. “So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television, commercials, and I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against ‘Bonanza,’ and ‘Rawhide,’ and all these things.”

You can find little threads connecting Blank’s subjects in any of his films—a musician here plays in a film there, and New Orleans and Cajun culture is nearly everywhere—and “Gap-Toothed Women” (1987) and “In Heaven There Is No Beer?” (1984) are no different: polka, the subject of “In Heaven,” shows up in Herzog’s shoe-eating documentary, and “Gap-Toothed Women” starts with Celtic hammer dulcimer and ends with a hot New Orleans stride piano, both styles of playing that show up in other Blank films. You might argue that these two films only appeal to niche interests—fans of polka music and dental phenomenologists. But to me, they represent the two ends of the filmmaker’s grand theme, the burning importance of the individual in North America’s communal traditions.

All the Blank trademarks can be found in “In Heaven There Is No Beer?”: long shots in which the subject swims around the frame, such as the author of “Who Stole the Kishka?”; glimpses of the subculture’s paraphernalia (a poster for Dick Pillar’s Polkabration, in New London, Connecticut); and hours logged in attendance at not just special but absolutely ordinary events. Blank films a bride as she dances with each guest at her wedding, and then a Catholic polka mass in Wisconsin. The cuts are gentle but always surprising, thanks to his longtime editor Maureen Gosling, and when Blank lays out the authoritative homework still required by the documentary—scholars and museum archives illustrating how Slavic emigration moved the polka out of Eastern Europe and into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, as well as into Lou Gajewski’s King of Clubs, a polka lounge in Buffalo, New York—he is never a bore.

Then there is the music, in this case coming at you loud and clear, and, it bears repeating, loud. From “Polka Shoes”:

Walter Cronkite’s got the news But he don’t got no polka shoes.

From the song that names the film:

In Heaven there’s no beer That’s why we drink it here. And when we’re gone from here You can bet all your friends are drinkin’ beer.

Every man is a philosopher in most Les Blank productions. A polkafest celebrant, when asked to interpret a lyric or a tradition, will most often state the obvious, and, nine times out of ten, the obvious ends up being a variation on an almost Epicurean exhortation to seize the day. Blank often talked about seeing Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” for the first time. At that moment in his life, Blank was in despair. He had decided, as a young man, that he was not good enough at writing to be the writer he wanted to be. “The Seventh Seal” changed everything, and, beginning with “Running Around Like A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off” in 1960, a Bergman homage, Blank was off and running to a life of film. Of course, death isn’t just obvious in “The Seventh Seal”; it’s a costar, and so it often is in Blank’s work. Then again, the obvious itself needs stating from time to time, and sometimes, when you state it, it even gets a little mystical, despite the smell of cheap stale beer in the air. “Let’s have a good time while we’re on this earth, I guess,” a polka singer says, “because its gonna be dry up there. Or down there.”

In another Blank film, “Always for Pleasure,” about New Orleans funeral parades, a marcher gives a version of the same speech:

You be here today, you’re gone tomorrow, you know. You don’t know what to look for after death. But you can always see what you can see in front of you. But me, you know, I like people to have a nice time, and when I leave the face of this earth, I like a little band behind me, and my friends having a nice time seeing me leave this place. But I’m living now.

It’s hard not to laugh during the interview with a polka fan who regularly attends Polkabration in order to, first, dance and, second, to be close to his dentist for his annual checkup. Though as soon as you laugh, you realize you are laughing with him; Blank’s films are blessedly snark-free. We learn that this particular polka fan, who looks to be a young sixty-five—worked for twenty years in a mine, eighteen years as a maintenance man, and at the time of the interview was operating a small store, seven days a week. “When I come here I just feel free as a bird—it’s just hilarious,” he says. “You break up the monotony, all the time you spend working hard, and its great—you come back refreshed and you do it all over again for another year.”

The long scenes of couples of all ages polka dancing are like Dutch landscapes, fields of happinesses, punctuated, say, with a scene of a dancer resting, his wife chatting with her friends. “She comes first, the music comes second,” the man says. “Maybe booze and music come together, but I don’t know—without music that’s it. But she loves it. She dances her brains out all night.”

“Gap-Toothed Women” should be shown to every high-school kid in North America, in an attempt to ward off everything that we are telling them about how they ought to look, how they ought to be. It is a howl against uniformity. It begins with a line from “The Canterbury Tales”: “[The Wife of Bath] knew much about wandering, by the way. She was gap-toothed, to tell the truth.” From there, the film, as the title suggests, features women with a gap between their two front teeth, many of them, celebrities and non-celebrities. The film is charming and funny, especially when the professor of literature, in high squeamishly un-erotic professorial mode, proceeds to explain that the Wife of Bath is extremely hot. (The professor was Blank’s professor at Tulane, and, Blank, remembering the speech, as well as a gap-toothed girl that mesmerized him as a kid, got the professor on camera to describe medieval notions about gap teeth, such as their tendancy to allow light from the moon to enter a person’s soul.)

It’s not a film that I want to say a lot about, for fear of hindering its ultra-light touch. That “Gap-Toothed Women” is more of an essay than a documentary proves that Blank did grow up to be a writer. It ends on a note that is simultaneously cynical and funny, hard-nosed and emotionally uplifting, which is to say it ends on a Blankian note. And just before the ending comes a speech from a gap-toothed dancer, which is a good speech to think about when thinking about Blank, who died of cancer, and headed off to a place with no beer:

I’m two years out from acute in remission from acute leukemia. I read the magazines about people [who say] “I got cancer and then my life fell into place.” Well, that’s a bunch of trash. I mean my life is still in the state that everyone else’s is—searching for what works for you, searching for what really means something to you. And it is a day-to-day struggle. It’s not something that falls into place when you are threatened with death. And I think that just being aware of your own mortality creates a poignant romance in your life. You know? It’s like this could be the last day that I’m around. And there was always, “What if I strained my ankle,” or “What if I get a scar on my stomach?” But hey, that little scar on your stomach? What’s that to death? It frees you up from those things. You get stepped on by a horse? Fine. You got a scar on your leg, oh well. You got a gap between your teeth? Hey, no problem. I started looking at myself as a young person now and thinking of myself as getting older and saying, “Hey, I might get gray hair! I might get arthritis or something. I might have wrinkles. I’ll be old. God, won’t that be neat!” It’s kind of, “Hey, this is going to be great.” Instead of, “Oh my God,” and there’s another one there! You see yourself in the mirror. “Should I get them straightened?” What are you going to do? So you dance and you love life and you do what you need to do to survive, and I think that that’s all there is. That’s really all that there is.